et tu, enlynn?: mastery build

I imagine you've already seen some hullabulloo about the changes in 4.2 to mastery. Buffs, yes. Changes, yes. But enough changes to warrant a dramatic playstyle and gearing change for Firelands?

Maybe.

I read the Holy Paladin: Mastery thread over on the Blizzard forums and thought to myself that going Zaroua's route was probably a great idea for 25 HM raiders. But, I'm not a HM raider, not yet. We're shooting to get normal modes down for Firelands but it didn't happen in T11 and quite frankly we had enough on our metaphorical guild plate without them. So I did think, when I read through this, that it didn't apply to me.

Then I saw that Rohan had joined the Mastery Club. Again, HM raider.

And then Adgamorix threw in his vote and I realized something: tank deaths on Shannox were wiping us. Back-to-back Arcing Slashes and melee attacks in .12 seconds were dealing 120k and 95k damage faster than my UI could display it. And if this build is supposedly very good for crazy ass spikey tank damage like this, then why wasn't I at least willing to give it a try?

I spent some justice points and got 4 pc set bonus (not so much for the bonus, but the two pieces with mastery were the best deal for the JP I had). I reforged and regemmed (all my Reckless became Artful), and picked up the pieces of gear with Mastery from the Firelands Rep Guys (vote: pathetic or not pathetic that I don't even know the faction I'm grinding for right now?).

I cobbled together a 23% bubble with hardly any effort. Previously, I had 77 mastery (so basically a 12% bubble).

And so after almost 50 attempts at Shannox over the last few weeks, we went in last night and killed him the second time. Our RL takes full credit for the first wipe, but the second pull was beautiful, pitch-perfect, and the loot flowed.

My meters were borked. According to Skada, my bubbles were... 44k. Which is actually the bubble I had on the MT when we pulled (which is crazy). I was disheartened, but I had several healers whisper me saying they felt the difference, that whatever I had done was a good thing.

Fortunately, WoL has the story. But I'm going to drag this out and first talk about my healing before, since I think that's important. Here's a picture of last night, a very-close Shannox attempt. My assignment is the same for both: Luxinterior, Shannox tank. He, I believe, made some minor to his gear over the weekend but I'm fairly certain the only change between last night and tonight was me.

Before, my haste-stacking paladin self:


Lots of Word of Glory, and lots of Divine Light spammed on my Beacon target (Lux) to generate Holy Power. Holy Radiance popped just about every Magma Burst, and I made a point to be inside the raid when it happened to maximize my AoE healing.

And now, with Mastery:


I made radical changes to my healing style. Beacon of Light jumped to my highest healing done because I set it on the other tank and basically forgot it for the fight. But check out my bubbling- a solid fifth of my healing done.

But did you catch the overheal on my direct heals? Oi.

A thought on Holy Radiance: Because my goal for this fight was to spam Holy Light on the tank the entire fight whether or not he needed it, I spent less time positioning myself to help with AoE. The numbers here are deceiving, because not only did I get less in-range ticks with this change and those ticks healed for less, but I was off by myself or sometimes just in the melee. I used Holy Radiance 10 times for both samples, but the data can't be compared because I behaved differently.

I might have lost a tick with the haste I lost, but I didn't lose any intellect so in theory each tick would have healed the same if I had played the same.

What didn't change

Judging on cooldown, plea and trinkets early and often, hitting AoE heal button every XX seconds in response to AoE pulses. Tank healing like it's going out of style.

I healed for a bit less overall with a mastery build, however, my ranking within my raid didn't change. The healing done page looked fairly similar for both in terms of what other healers were doing.

What did change

Everything else! Who I healed and what spells I used. I went from favoring Divine Light to being afraid of it. I lost several hundred spirit to make this change, pigeon-holing me into favoring Holy Light and using DL and Flash of Light for oh-shit moments (even that oh-shit moment that I used an instant-cast FoL while running ended up being 100% overheal because others beat me to it). Beacon became a fire-and-forget buff on the other side of the raid instead of an active tool to help me raid heal and generate Holy Power while keeping my assignment up.

(BTW, raise your hand if you forgot Infusion procs insta-cast FoLs again! Cause I sure did till last night).

Beacon probably deserves its own post since I find I'm using mine differently than other paladins in the raid. But before I derail entirely, I had to mention the Beacon change because it did change how I healed the tank. When Beacon isn't on my assignment, I am restricted. With a mastery build, I am further restricted to healing my target. Raid healing with this setup doesn't heal my target, and those raid bubbles aren't likely to get absorbed in a fight like Shannox. Also, time spent not healing the tank is time not spent building up bubbles. So this build really, really pigeon-holes a paladin into one thing and one thing only: spamming Holy Light on the tank whether or not he needs it.

Pardon me. I could have sworn I just heard a skeleton screaming "Bone Storm!" from across a chamber of ice.

TLDR:

This build is effective for crazy tank damage fights. I can not deny it. For 25 raiders and both 10 and 25 HM raiders, I can see why stacking mastery would be a benefit to the raid for specific fights.

However, (and of course there's a however), a paladin really ought to take a long look at her playing habits and raiding roster. There are a lot of situations where a mastery build would be a great idea, but I also believe there will be a lot of situations where a haste-spirit build would be stronger.

After Shannox, we went and did a few attempts on our next boss target, Lord Ryolith, and holy cow had we not gotten Shannox down I would have felt useless for Ryolith. Heavy raid damage fights are not not friendly to the mastery build. (However, after comparing myself to the other holy paladin in my raid, I could have tried a lot harder so the verdict is most certainly not out yet for how best a mastery build paladin can use her abilities in this kind of fight. I'll post more once I figure it out.)

Should you go mastery? If and only if you play with a regular group of folks so you can be a designated main tank healer and work with the rest of your raid to help you get the most effectiveness out of this playstyle. I'm not so sure that 10 regular modes require a stacking setup, either, my experiences with 10s isn't near as great as 25s, but I just don't see the tank damage as crazy enough to warrant it. 10's, to me, seem to encourage staying general (ie, flexible) instead of going specialized, and with 10 mans that loss of spirit to focus on mastery is going to hurt.

But in 25s (even regular), volunteering to be that paladin might not be such a bad idea, especially if your group is solid enough that it's just assumed you're going to be one of the main tank healers. Does your 25-raid need 2? I have no idea. I'm not going to recommend that the other healadins in my raid make the switch.

Why?

If my snark earlier was not obvious enough, spamming a heal on a person whether they need it or not... is not FUN. I have squirmy feelings about casting with no regards to overheal. I half-wonder if we're going to see nerfs since the mastery build encourages spam-casting that goes against design intent.

Did I mention it's not fun? Sure, it felt real good to get the boss down but being a Holy-Light-Metronome (too bad paladins can't be Gnomes, har har!) will get real old, real fast. I mean, I'll do it, I like getting bosses down just like any other gal, but I lost a lot of flexibility to gain tank healing stability. Especially since I got feedback from the other healers saying it made their jobs less stressful. For me, sticking with a mastery build will be taking one for the team.

And a HM raider will have different experiences, since they will have a lot less overheal.

TLDR, for real this time

If you're struggling with keeping up tank damage that, by the logs, looks impossible to heal, going with a mastery build might be the ticket to downing those bosses.

But I would say, if you don't heal with a steady raid group, if your raid roster is constantly changing and your focus within the raid is different every night, then a more balanced approach might be better. And if you value your flexibility within your raid group, then you probably will not enjoy this specialist build.

still in the dark: mastery buffs not enough

I promised myself I'm not going to let this go too long, so not much theorycrafting. Also, there may be QQ ahead.

Magmaw WoL for 4-27. Magmaw WoL for 4-19.

I went from 36% "overheal" on mastery to 38. Old mastery was 3-4% of my healing, now it's 6%.

I mean, it's a buff so I shouldn't complain. But here's what I think happened:

Tank healing for paladins hasn't changed. Most of our shields get overwritten before the absorb can happen. My tank absorbs for 4-19 and 4-27 are a bit different from playstyle change (more raw heals done spamming the tank on 4-27 because our other tank healer fell into the lava).

However, the mastery buffs did affect LoD absorbs. My absorbs on the raid on 4-19 were all overheal in the 50-75% range. Those numbers last night went down, or rather, the amount absorbed went up (overheal in the 30-70% range, with more bubbles being entirely absorbed).

So we're a little bit better at raid healing. A little. I don't know about you, but my raid assignments are still like they were in Wrath: pallies on tanks, the rest on raids. Sure, I pop Holy Radiance (which doesn't proc mastery) every minute when the boss does his raidwide-pulse-damage like a good healadin, but let's be honest here:

Why in the hell would I assign myself to the raid when we have shamans, druids, and priests? So I can use half-powered Light of Dawns once every 14 seconds?

QQ. I know my raw healing is often comparable to what other healers do, but I still think healadins are broken.

One spell on a 40 second cooldown does not fix "it".

The way the encounters are designed, we're tank healers who pop a raid-cooldown, then continue spamming tanks. There's really no spell selection, and if we're not clumped up...

And with the damage model in Cataclysm, we can't even tank heal by ourselves. I mean, I know that no 1 healer can, but still. I can, in theory, stop raid healing, and the raid healers would just have less overheal.

I main-changed in the second tier of Wrath, and later called it a mistake because of all the time it wastes. Switching to priest isn't an option (though a girl can dream) because we have so many priests in our raid. Right now, we could use a shaman, but our alt run already has so many shamans that gearing her up would be difficult. Oh, yeah, and she's 72. So when I talk about thinking about not being a paladin anymore, I do mean to say I've been giving this a lot of thought over a long time. Can you believe that 4.0 was six months ago? Holy paladins are still the punchline.

We already have one holy paladin in the raid. I feel at this point having 1 less paladin and 1 more anything would be better than having 2 healadins. Especially since our shaman hangs around the 50% attendance mark.

How is 4.1 treating you? How do you feel about your healadin and her contributions to the raid?

i'm a crit monster

Here's a crit I did of myself for our second Atramedes kill. I actually wrote this up last week but since we didn't raid last night I haven't had much new to talk about.

Well, like every other 25 man raiding guild on the internet, we are recruiting. We need healers who can make it at least 3 (of 4) nights a week. Why choose FL over all the others in the world? There! Are! Four! Lights!

Check out this Star Trek Cookie Jar.

I am starting healer evaluations this week so I did this one as an example (though I promised that good things would show up on other evals, since this was my own I didn't feel the need to pat myself on the back or anything). And even then it was weird addressing myself as you. But hey.


Survivability
Died early in the fight to too much sound. Yeah, someone dragged something bad through the raid and it wasn't technically "your fault", but you could have tried harder to avoid it. In a personal responsibility fight such as this one, everyone is accountable for their own actions and that does mean that CYA is your first and utmost priority.

Damage Taken
#7 on damage taken. Other than the incident mentioned above, you're taking comparable damage to the other raid members. Specific to Atramedes, you gained 80 sound from air phase bombs and and 35 sound from discs. There's definite room for improvement, there.

Buff Uptime
I look for 100% uptime on buffs like Beacon of Light, Judgements of the Pure, and Auras. Save the moments while you were dead, you had that, though you probably could have judged and started healing sooner after taking the brez. You have 90-some % active time, so you're staying busy when you're alive.

Cooldown Management
For the first half of the fight, it looks like you ignored your cooldowns. The air phase is a great time to use Divine Plea, from the looks of the Damage Taken log above, so instead of two uses, you potentially had time for four. The JC Owl trinket has no drawback to using, and can be used on cooldown. I would recommend trying to push for five uses on a fight this long.

For Aura Mastery, Divine Favor, Avenging Wrath, and Ho-Sac: The same thing as above. Ho-Sac is pretty situational since there's no gib-protection, but Avenging Wrath and Aura Mastery on a 2 minute cooldown. That's at least 4 if not 5 uses on a fight like this, and with times of predictable, raid-wide AoE damage, there are opportunities to use these more often.

For the banana man (Guardian of Ancient Kings), well, you haven't used this in a week now. Please look for opportunities to summon your helper. It may not be a ton of healing, but it's cheap healing. I don't see a LoH for this fight either, which is 10% mana as well as a big heal on the tank. That's something you've dedicated glyph spots so that it's available for every attempt.

Spell Selection
Divine Light is a great tank healing spell. With 21% overheal, you could probably weave in a few other types of heals to save some mana when a DL isn't entirely necessary, but there were no tank deaths and you didn't run OOM. I see a few more places where you could really help out with raid healing using Holy Radiance. Mathematically, you can run higher than 50% overheal on Radiance and it is still a "cheap" spell.
For Holy Shock, for a fight as long as this one, you had the potential to cast 81 times. In actual, you cast 50 shocks, which means you lost out on upwards of 30 holy power. You generated 69 holy power in the fight, so this is a non-trivial amount you're missing out on. Your LoDs have fairly low overheal, so not only is it a free heal, it's an effective one. LoD also transfers to the Beacon tank so it's a very safe heal to use while still keeping your tank in mind.

Mana Usage
You judged approximately once every 28 seconds, or 36 times. For a fight this long, you had a potential of 61 judges. While I don't see any other holy paladins in WoL judging on cooldown, I do see them averaging closer to 4 a minute, instead of 2 a minute. I think 4/minute is a good target.
Your holy lights are averaging 50% overheal. If there isn't much damage to heal, I would look to judge or use holy shock instead (see below, assignment survivability).

Encounter Awareness
This is a hard thing to evaluate objectively. In the wipes for this fight we had last night, you did a lot better at flexing your encounter knowledge. This kill is the "worst" snapshot for your sound gain and survivability, but this just reinforces the importance of being consistent and persistent.

Communication
There are times when you are unable to heal the tank, or you died, or silenced, and you didn't call it out over mumble. There are times you did. But there are more times you didn't. When we don't communicate with each other, players often assume the worst when things go south. If we are communicating, we as a team have an opportunity to salvage a wipe, and our fellow raiders are less likely to be frustrated when they understand what's happening to us.

Please remember to sign up for raids!

Assignment survivability
Your assignment ("the tank") didn't die in hardly any of the Atramedes attempts, but you could have pushed Beacon of Light a bit harder since there were three healers assigned to the tank and spot healed the raid more. In a one-tank fight, BoL is often more healing done a healadin's direct heals. Almost half of your Divine Light casts went straight to the tank which generated holy power, but had you casted more shocks and spread those DLs through the raid, you could have ended up with the same holy power and more healing done on the raid through Beacon transfer.

Summary
Focus on managing your cooldowns, using them earlier in the fight. Squeeze in judgements and holy shocks whenever you can, again, earlier and therefore more often. Be more willing to talk in mumble when something is going to keep you from your assignment.

(Now that I've terrified my healing team...)

fun with graphs: maloriak

It's been a pretty great raid week, so far. We have five bosses down. Omni gave us quite a bit of trouble the second time (we got him on Monday and again last night), but these things happen.

If you're having trouble with slimes on Toxi, you can encourage your raiders not to use aggro dumps. Abilities like Hand of Protection, Ice Block, and Feign Death do 'work', but then the slimes will target someone else and they won't get the icon or the raid warning. Chaos!

Then we went and one-shot Maloriak, which was awesome. I decided to take a look at my performance for this guy, since it was kind of messy I figured there would be room for me to improve. I had some fun with my photo program, where I aligned my buffs cast with my healing done and the raid's damage taken.

Bossy Pally and the Giant Spoon has a great write-up for how to use WoL to track your buffs cast. It's a pre 4.0.1, but her directions for navigating logs are still spot-on.

Granted, these alignments aren't perfect but I think they are still close enough to give me a sense for how I was responding to the encounter.


First and most important, this is some weak healadin cooldown management. Could have gotten one more trinket pop, three or four more Ho-Sacs, two more Aura Masteries, and I don't see any HoPs or Salvs (though hops and salvs are situational).

What is this? Why did Beacon fall off for that long? How embarrassing.

I have been saving Avenging Wrath and Divine Favor for specific periods of heavy damage with Holy Radiance. I don't think this is bad, per se, but I could have squeezed out another 2 uses of AW and still had it available for those times I used it for burst raid healing.

Since I ended the fight with more than 20k mana (I think it was more like 40% mana but I don't remember for sure now), I am not too concerned that I did not Divine Plea much. Once 4.0.6 hits, this ability will be a little more usable... but then in an encounter like this one without a lull period, better to judge more and reserve mana than endanger my tank. I had thought these two uses came at a time when my assigned tank had less 3 or 6 adds and we had just recovered from a red phase, although according to the graph I timed the first plea very poorly, the raid was taking quite a bit of damage.

It's not listed above but I judged 34 times, or approximately once every 14 seconds. Not bad at all. I could push it if I needed to. I didn't include that graph, but I'm judging fairly consistently throughout the fight (though I could have judged sooner in the fight to get JotP going).

Our first death was a healer who had Consuming Flames. I could have helped prevent this by focusing him.

I potentially could have used Radiance more than I did, but I did manage to hit it during the four major raid damage spikes of the fight (the fifth spike was tank damage from the burn phase, and my healing spike was LoH from the looks of it).

A quick note on mastery: My mastery absorbs are a bit higher (less nonabsorbs) and make up more of my healing than the last time I wrote about it. I believe this is because my tank was assigned to adds, so the damage was coming in more often in smaller chunks. For bosses that do big hits on a long swing timer, our mastery will (in theory) shine less.

So there it is. I've certainly progressed from standing in Pillars of Fail, there's always room for growth. Hope you enjoyed my performance analysis!

feeling illuminated?

I've been avoiding mastery (Illuminated Healing) on my gear for a while. Skada was estimating my mastery at less than 5% of a boost to my healing, as opposed to the extremely visible boosts that critical strike and haste offer. I figured, without the math, that with only our direct heals causing the bubble, and with the duration being short enough that not every bubble gets absorbed, it's going to be a pathetic amount of healing.

And at first glance it is, because Beacon of Light, Protector of the Innocent, and Holy Radiance don't cause bubbles, and those account for a brickload of my healing.

First, the log: WoL report for Four Lights Conclave Kill


Second, some rough math. I added together all my direct heals, including overheal. We're including on this list: Flash of Light, Holy Light, Divine Light, Word of Glory, Light of Dawn, and Lay on Hands (though I didn't cast any FoL). That's total effective direct healing of 1,302,129 and total direct raw healing of 1,451,189.

Third, my mastery. Like I said, I've been avoiding mastery when possible. According to my armory, I am currently carrying 8.89 mastery rating (8 base, .89 from gear). Each point of mastery rating adds 1.25% to each bubble. 10 base +(.89*1.25)=11.1125. So, each direct heal should in theory proc a bubble of 11.1125%.

In Theory

Total raw direct healing of 1,451,189 should proc 161,227 in bubbles.

In Practice

According to WoL, I had potential absorbs of 161,000 (listed to the far right as Overhealing). So my napkin math and WoL haven't disagreed too much there. Below, I am using 161,000.

However, in practice, I only had 105,818 absorbs via Illuminated Healing, or 65.73% of total potential bubbles. 55,182 (34.27% of every bubble) went to waste. Instead of enjoying 11.1125% absorbs, it's practically closer to 7.3%. Which isn't actually as bad as I had imagined it before, though still nothing to cheer about. WoL ranks Illuminated Healing as 3.9% of my healing because a good half of my heals don't proc it.

Tank Healing And Mastery

If what I've done above isn't convoluted enough, I decided to take a look at absorbs on just the tanks. After all, if Mastery helps us be better tank healers, then it's still a good stat. However, to do the modeling, I had to take a look at all holy paladin heals on each tank, all effective absorbs on the tank, each paladin's mastery, and extrapolate potential absorbs (the things I do for WoW...)





However, what I found is that (and here's a shocker) since most of our direct heals our going to the tanks, most of our wasted bubbles are on the tanks (68% effective, compared to almost 66% overall).


In summary, I am going to keep my eye on my mastery in other encounters, but crit, spirit, and haste are going to offer me far more healing than Mastery (can and) will.

pillar of fail

First raids this week. We're squeaking by on healers, running with 6 when we'd like 7, and two of those are dps who offered to heal just so we could raid. Three cheers for flexible hybrids!

Adgamorix over at Divine Plea has a fine write-up on his own raiding experiences and how he'd like to improve.

Myself, my logs are here: Conclave - my damage taken over 2-1/2 hours of wipes
and here: in which Enlynn takes 58 ticks of Pillar of Flame over 19 attempts

Alright. I'm still feeling pretty clunky. I haven't keybound Radiance but I think I need to. Perhaps I need a macro for Bursty or Two +Radiance, as well. I am wasting valuable time trying to get to the button when I decide it's time.

Though I think I'm doing okay with my other spells. LoD is ridiculous in a good way. A lightwell disappeared from getting full clicks last night! Though with only 9 Healthstone uses over 19 attempts... Well. There's room for everyone to improve. We're raiding again for the first time in weeks, maybe months. Everyone is learning. New encounters, new mechanics, new spells, new talents, new rotations.

And to be fair, on 25 man it's a lot harder to see ground effects like Pillar of Flame when there are 16 players stacked over 3 healing effects. I did learn something valuable: boss encounter addons work much better if you have them enabled.

I am using DBM now simply because I can't get DXE to work. I miss DXE and if anyone has a link to one that works for the new encounters, it would be MUCH appreciated.

EDIT: I should have mentioned that there are "two" pillars of flame. The first will spawn the adds, which is the one-that-must-be-avoided, and another (larger area) which does fire damage. If you are using an addon that tracks and announces fails, it will announce it for those who take damage (even if they don't spawn the adds). So while I am shaming myself for 58 ticks of avoidable damage, I didn't necessarily spawn adds 58 times. If you're trouble-shooting for your raid, keep that in mind. I'd only call it a fail if the adds are spawned.

UPDATE: Adgamorix suggested we move more ranged to melee range and on 1-12-11 we got him down following his good advice. We put our hunters and a lock (who had specced to be an AoE monster) on the outside and this worked out a lot better than having everyone try to dodge the pillar. It also kept all our healers in range of tank at all times, and I asked the healers to each focus on one of the ranged staying out so they got the extra heals as needed (that may have been overkill, but boss kills are boss kills). So, this definitely works!

Logs! Shamanigans!

I found a neat website earlier today I wanted to share with you:

www.wowraidaudit.com

If you upload your WoL parses, it will, by fight, show you how many cooldowns a player could have used, and it will also show you handy uptime. There are a couple of things that are wonky, especially for healing. I've really been looking for a handy DPS analysis tool - I'm fairly comfortable using WoL to analyze healing, but for DPS I just don't even know what I'm looking at.

Here's my audit for our Putricide kill last week, with a few discrepancies and thoughts below:

Buffs/Debuffs has been the most valuable, however, it does take some encounter knowledge to understand whether all those 0's meant I failed or whether the cooldown just didn't apply. For instance, and if I am mistaken (please, for the love of Elune, let me know so I can improve) leave me a comment, Aura Mastery doesn't help much because the damage type is nature. Ok, so I didn't use Divine Favor at all. Thats kinda lame. However, I did maintain 99% uptime on JotP (I do love to judge), but I didn't use either of my self-only bubbles.

It also doesn't list sacred shield for me, however, according to the actual WoL parse this is built from, I had 47% uptime on Sacred Shield (turns out another paladin was overwriting mine, which while annoying, at least the tank was fully shielded).

I don't understand how it's suggesting I only should have used DP twice, when on a seven minute fight I could have used it seven times. Five uses isn't bad, considering two of those were at phase changes whether I needed it or not.

The Malleable Goo thing is interesting, considering I know that I myself never actually got hit by it, and that was splash damage (other players took 45-66k damage in Malleable Goo, but I digress!).

I found this far more handy for DPS, for a couple of reasons. A players active DPS time usually reflects their standing on the charts. Players with consistently above 90% are the same ones in the top five. Meanwhile, I saw DPS with active times as low as 60%. I won't link any examples because I don't feel comfortable publicly shaming anyone but myself, but if you want to see it for yourself, upload your guilds parses and see how it works for you.

Also, while I'm talking about logs, Ophelie did an awesome write-up about how to make WoL show you uptime for healing buffs. I had a couple of healers looking for distinct feedback for improvement and I couldn't think of anything to say until I saw this. You can plot uptime for buffs you ideally want up 100%, but it can also show you when in the fight a player is managing cooldowns. Handy indeed!

Shamanigans

It's no secret that I've wanted all four healers. Oddly enough, shaman was my first healing character I created, but I fizzled out leveling her when I researched a bit more and realized that priest was more my style (so then I made a paladin. Go figure!). I still had a level 49 shaman on a server I don't play on anymore, but I made another shaman, horde side, on Malfurion. It's been a blast, and I plan on leveling has as resto. I'm not in a hurry, and ideally thats why I want her eventually at max level, to understand the resto raiding shaman.

It's been a lot of fun to be back in Mulgore (I started playing horde, then switched to Ally upon insistence of a friend, who of course is long gone from the game now), although it hasn't been without its foibles. I went into a WSG with Mayhem's rogue and had some major disorientation. I also thought we were winning because the alliance had two flags. Oops!

Edit: I found this website on skeletonjack.com about DPS and WoL and while it's not technical, it's a good read. Enjoy!